Go On Lad

"Go On Lad" begins in 1886, with an over-the-shoulders view of a boy in a flat cap and brown jacket buying a loaf of bread in a bakery. After making his purchase, the boy leaves the shop into a bustling Victorian-era street, narrowly avoiding being run down by a horse and cart. He is chased into an alleyway by the cart's driver, losing his flat cap in the pursuit, and he passes a poster about the Titanic. When he exits through the other side the alley, a suffragette protest is underway. The boy weaves through a crowd of marching women bearing placards, emerging into an open square during World War I, where he spies a column of young soldiers on parade. The boy accompanies the soldiers for a few moments before peeling away to climb a nearby wall. After saluting the soldier he had marched next to, he climbs down the other side into the interbellum, and runs past a couple engaged in a conversation beside a period car. He kicks a can through another alley, following it into another street; one in ruins from The Blitz.

The music turns sombre for a moment as a family of refugees passes by, and an excerpt from Winston Churchill's delivery of the "We shall fight on the beaches" speech plays from a radio in a nearby home. A Spitfire flies overhead as the boy climbs over a pile of rubble to enter a new street, in which residents are engaged in a street party celebrating the accession of Elizabeth II. He crawls under the table, takes a biscuit and a glass of lemonade, then runs on into 1966, where a group celebrating England's victory in the 1966 FIFA World Cup chant "Champions!" as they pass him in a car. From here, changes to the boy's costume are made with every transition, reflecting the fashions of the periods he passes through. Farther down the road from 1966, the boy passes a British Asian couple in the 1970s, reflecting the spike in immigration in the community during that period. He turns a corner, running into a conflict between police and striking miners in the 1980s. One of the miners jeers the boy, and he continues running. As he runs alongside a river during the Millennium celebrations on New Year's Day 2000, fireworks go off in the background. Finally, the boy makes a turn into a council estate in 2008 and sits down with the loaf of bread at his kitchen table. His mother calls to him, 'Is that you home, love?', to which the boy replies 'Yeah'. And the piece closes on a shot of the boy's hand reaching for a slice of the Hovis loaf over the tagline "As good today as it's always been."

From 1967 to 2007, the Hovis brand of bread was owned by Rank Hovis McDougall, and for much of that time was the market leader in the United Kingdom. However, following a "chop and change" marketing strategy, including several "confused" brand relaunches through the first half of the 2000s,^[3] rival brand Warburtons had increased sales and profits, and in 2006 both brands had approximately 28% of the £1.6b UK bread market.^[3][4] Despite continuing to show profits of £387m, Hovis continued to lose ground to Warburtons. Sales of the latter had increased by 24% in 2007 alone; by 2008, for every two loaves of Hovis sold in the UK, Warburtons sold three.^[5] The continuing failure of the brand began to affect Premier Foods as a whole, with the company's share price dropping from £3.50 to £1.80 in the 18 months following the acquisition.^[4]

Despite this, Hovis was still a valuable brand. Its reported profits, while declining, still amounted to £387m, making it the fourth largest grocery brand in the UK, behind Coca-Cola, Warburtons, and Walkers Crisps.^[4] Premier Foods hired a new head of marketing, Jon Goldstone, known for a strong branding background at Procter & Gamble.^[5] Goldstone quickly identified the issue facing Hovis, surmising that "[Hovis] had got into a situation where Warburtons was synonymous with healthier bread from real bakeries and Kingsmill had cornered the value end of the market. We were being squeezed and were falling fast."^[6] Goldstone's solution was to re-launch the brand, changing the formula of the bread, redesigning the packaging, and putting £15m into a new advertising campaign.^[2][7] To this end, Premier Foods consolidated its marketing across all brands into two advertising agencies, Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy (MCBD) and McCann Erickson, with the latter originally taking on Hovis.^[8] But the Account Director Muna Nageh stayed close to the Hovis client and eventually had a chance to win the account out of McCann Erickson, who had failed to crack the brief whilst MCBD had been doing well on the brands they had won. The relaunch was the first campaign by MCBD for the brand, though it had done work on other Premier Foods labels such as Branston, Batchelors and OXO previously.^[4]

In April 2008, Goldstone met with the team of MCBD, to discuss the advertising campaign which was to accompany the relaunch. They reviewed previous Hovis advertising for ideas, paying particular attention to the 1973 television advertisement Boy On Bike. Directed by Ridley Scott, Boy On Bike was an iconic piece of British culture; in a 2003 poll, over 60% of British people over 40 years old could still hum the theme used in the commercial ("New World Symphony by Dvorak),^[2] and in 2006 it was voted the greatest advertising campaign of all time by the public.^[9] From this, the campaign's theme was established: nostalgia.^[2] A pitch was put together by creative team Gavin Horrance and Danny Hunt of MCBD,^[10] comprising a set of "mood films" constructed from stock footage, and the idea of "the perilous journey a young boy takes through 122 years of British history to bring the small brown load back to his mam."^[4] The pitch was presented to Qualitative Assessment, a focus group of consumers, where it met a very positive response.^[1] From there, Goldman took the proposal directly to Robert Schofield, the head of Premier Foods, who greenlit the project immediately. A budget of £1,000,000 was put aside for production of the commercial alone, over three times as much as had ever been spent on production of a Premier Foods commercial to that date.^[1]

With permission to go ahead, MCBD began searching for a director to lead the production, eventually settling on Ringan Ledwidge. Ledwidge, who was working with Daniel Kleinman at the London-based production company Rattling Stick, had a reputation for good work on "magical realism" projects,^[1] with previous work including Forever for Volkswagen in 2002,^[11] and Rewind City for Orange earlier in 2008.^[12] The Hovis campaign, now assigned the title Go On Lad, was the most expensive and complex commercial Ledwidge had directed to date.^[10]

With only four months set aside for production of the commercial, work began in earnest on scouting for locations and cast capable of presenting the desired tone for Go On Lad. Several locations across the United Kingdom were looked at as potential sites for the six-day shoot, but while the producers of Boy On Bike had dressed a street in Dorset to appear Northern, Ledwidge opted to film in Northern England itself.^[13] Liverpool's Sweeting Street was dressed for use as the setting for the opening Victorian scene,^[14] while Falkner Street appeared as the World War I^[15][16][17] and interbellum^[18] scenes. Workers for the City Council partially demolished three buildings to set the scene for the Blitz section, bringing in over fifty tonnes of rubble for the set dressing.^[13][18] Locals of Hardy Street in Garston were recruited as extras for the Coronation scene, which was filmed at that location.^[13]

In all, over 1750 people were hired to act as extras in Go On Lad,^[19] including over 200 members of historical reenactment societies for the World War I scene alone.^[13] In casting for the role of the boy, Ledwidge wanted to eschew the "stylised blonde healthy child seen in most modern European advertising" in favour of someone who would evoke memories of the actors in productions such as Kes or Great Expectations.^[4] The boy eventually settled on for the role was Brian Mackie, a thirteen-year-old with no prior acting experience.^[13][20]

Post-production was contracted to The Mill, who were given the brief to make it appear as though no computer-generated imagery or other visual effects had been used at all. The majority of the visual effects work was done using the Autodesk software Flame and Maya. This included simple work such as removing anachronistic yellow road markings, satellite dishes, and replacing PVC windows. More complex work included the removal of several buildings with modern architectural styles or features, the creation of a CGI colliery, a Spitfire and a Concorde jet aeroplane (which was later cut in editing), crowd multiplication for the striking miners and suffragettes, and the recreation of the Millennial fireworks display.^[21]

For editing of the commercial, Ledwidge looked to Richard Orrick, an editor he had collaborated with several times in the past. Several angles had been shot for each scene, as well as a number of cutaways establishing the era that the boy was travelling through. However, the brief for the commercial was specifically for a 122-second cut, one second for every year since the establishment of Hovis in 1886.^[5] For this reason, and to reinforce the viewer's connection with the boy, almost every shot which didn't feature Mackie was cut. Additional editing work was done to smooth the transitions between eras and maintain a steady pace within the commercial's narrative.^[11] Until half-way through editing, the music accompanying Go On Lad was to have been "Town Called Malice" by The Jam. However, after the right to use the piece had been purchased, alterations to the pacing of the narrative led Ledwidge to commission a new piece via Woodwork Music from Philip Kay of the Mancunian independent act Working for a Nuclear Free City, titled "History".^[1][10]